I have some Excel files that I work on both at home and at the office. I keep the latest versions on a diskette, do whatever updates on them, and then save them back to the diskette and to the hard drive of whichever PC I’m using. The office PC has Windows 2000, and the home PC is Windows 95. I save the files as Excel 5.0/95 so they’ll be compatible with the older PC. This has worked for me for some time.
However, yesterday my office PC suddenly informed me that the diskette was “not Formatted”, and I couldn’t access any of the files. Yet, last night at home there was no problem accessing the diskette and its files. Again today, the office PC still cannot access the diskette.
I’m not looking for any diatribes about how MS stuff is crap or whatever. I’d just like an informative explanation on why this happened or how I can get the office PC to recognize the diskette once again. Thanks.
Floppy heads can go out of factory set alignment over time. While they will read and write disks they have created other PCs cannot read the disks.
First try a new diskette in case the one you are using is now unreliable.
Using new floppy disks trying writing information on both floppy drives on a third machine to see if both can be read.
If it’s not the floppy disk itself, once you have identified the defective floppy drive simply replace it or use another storage medium like USB/parallel compact flash readers or a Zip drive.
When you say the office PC has Windows 2000 and the home PC has Windows 95, do you mean Office 2K and Office95? If not, what versions of XL are you using on each machine? You would only need to use XL 5.0/95 if the XL version was older, not the Windows version.
That said, it sounds more like a diskette problem, especially if you’ve been writing files to that same disk for some time. Does your Office PC accept any other diskettes or is just that one bad?
Also, why don’t you attach the XLS files to Email and send them from your office PC Email account to a free Yahoo account and access that Yahoo account from home? Or, if you don’t have an office Email account, just send it as an attachment to yourself in a free Yahoo account? If it can fit onto a disk, it can fit as an attachment to Yahoo mail. There’s no need to continue to use a diskette to do it, as that magnetic media isn’t as reliable as attaching it in Email.
What astro said. If your home PC can still access the disk, either your floppy drive at work or at home is out of alignment. Use a new disk and see what happens.
I dunno about using Yahoo or other free accounts. I’ve had emails not show up. Your company may have restrictions on what kind of company information can be sent over the Internet as well.
Floppy disks are very unreliable. Magnets from speakers, phones, refrigerators, etc, can screw them up. Use email next time if you can. It’s much more reliable.